1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to insertion machines and, more particularly, pertains to an insertion machine operable for searching a data table in order to determine an amount of postage for a mailpiece and/or to determine a prioritized selection of documents to be included in the mailpiece.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Multifeeder station machines are widely utilized for mailing applications wherein a plurality of different types of enclosures, such as account related enclosures, advertising enclosures or enclosures of general or limited interest, are to be included with a customer's monthly statement. Examples of such applications are monthly statements mailed by utilities, credit card companies, and banking or other financial institutions. Included, typically, with the statement are one or more enclosures, or inserts, which may convey a message to the company's customers, such as an offer of additional services, or of a change in company policy, or advertisements provided by third parties for inclusion within the company's monthly mailing.
Illustrative of such insertion machines are a U.S. Pat. No. 3,935,429, issued Jan. 27, 1976 to George N. Branecky and Gary R. Sochrim, and a U.S. Pat. No. 4,077,181, issued Mar. 7, 1978 to Leslie K. Asher, Charles E. Gibson, and Frank T. Roetter, each of the aforementioned patents being assigned to the assignee of the present application. Also illustrative of such an insertion machine is U.S. Pat. No. 4,733,359 issued Mar. 22, 1988 entitled: Document Collating and Inserting System Having Displays for Document Count Verification, in the names of Harry Luperti and Robert Irvine.
Although the current insertion machines are well suited for their intended applications, the evolving requirements of the marketplace now demand insertion machines capable of making last miinute decisions regarding: (a) which documents, or inserts, are to be included in a mailpiece and (b) a required amount of postage for the mailpiece.
An application where this capability may prove especially advantageous concerns bank checking accounts wherein a variable number of documents expressive of a customer's monthly statement, a variable number of cancelled checks, and possibly one or more inserts of a general or advertising nature are required to be mailed. Due at least to the variation of the number of statement pages and cancelled checks between customers, the required postage for mailpieces produced will consequently vary over a wide range of postage values.
As is well known, the present postage rate categories for first-class letter mail are ultimately based on a final, total weight of a mailpiece. Therefore, any procedure for determining the correct amount of postage for a mailpiece must involve at some point in the procedure a weight-determining step.
Traditionally, such a weight-determining step would comprise weighing the stuffed envelope. As insertion machine throughputs increase, however, this technique of weighing each mailpiece becomes less practical, more complex and, hence, more expensive for the customer. Furthermore, such a weighing does not lend itself to supporting other advancements in insertion machine technology, such as a dynamic selection of inserts based on priority levels and/or the extremely desirable goal of "topping off" a mailpiece with additional inserts to take full advantage of a monetary value of a postage category.
In response to this limitation of the prior art it has been known to provide an insertion machine wherein the per item weight of the inserts held at a plurality of feeding stations is stored in a data processing memory. A processing means, using the stored per item weights, calculates a total weight based on the number of inserts selectively fed from the feeding stations. This calculated weight is then utilized to determine which one of a plurality of postage meters, each being set to apply postage relating to a different weight category, will be subsequently activated to apply postage to the envelope. Such a machine is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,571,925 issued on Feb. 25, 1986 to Jerryl Adams.
A problem arises in the use of such a system in that the processing means, which is an embedded microprocessor-based processing unit, is required to calculate the total weight of each mailpiece in a realtime manner while simultaneously controlling the activation of various feeding stations, postage meters, and other machine components. This problem is made especially acute as the number of feeding stations is increased. Inasmuch as modern insertion machines rely on a "pipelined" stream of documents being processed at any given time in order to achieve a high mailpiece throughput, there may be a large number of mailpieces being processed at any given time by the machine. The demands placed upon the processing unit in controlling the oepration of the machine and simultaneously calculating the total weights of a plurality of mailpieces may place a limitation on the number of feed stations which the machine may have. In addition, such processing unit demands may result in the throughput of the machine being limited to an economically unjustifiable low rate.
Another problem in the use of such a machine is that the machine, unlike an insertion machine disclosed in a copending application Ser. No. 890,677, filed on July 30, 1986 (abandoned in favor of continuing application Ser. No. 205,584 filed June 6, 1988) for L. Pintsov and entitled "Insertion Machine With Prioritized Selection Of Inserts", does not address the desirable goal of optimizing the number of the included inserts in order to achieve the full benefit of the postage category into which the envelope falls. Neither does such a machine address the problem of the selection of enclosures for insertion based on criteria other than weight, such as demographic or other characteristics of the addressee.
It is therefore an objective of the present invention to provide an insertion machine system which rapidly determines a required value of postage for a mailpiece in a real-time, low cost, and high speed manner.
It is a further objective of the present invention to provide an insertion machine system wherein a predetermined data table of postage values is generated remotely from the insertion machine and thereafter inputted into the insertion machine at a time prior to the time that the machine is utilized for the insertion of documents.
It is a further objective of the present invention to provide an insertion machine system which determines a required value of postage for a mailpiece by utilizing a table search technique to look-up the required value in a predetermined data table of postage values.
It is a further objective of the present invention to provide an insertion machine system wherein a predetermined data key, or token, descriptive of the required documents for a specific mailpiece is inputted into the insertion machine to enable the machine to rapidly search a data table to locate a required value of postage for the specific mailpiece and/or to determine which inserts to include within a particular mailpiece.
It is a still further objective of the present invention to provide an insertion machine system wherein the predetermined data key is descriptive of which documents are to be fed for a particular mailpiece, the documents being selected according to an application specific prioritization scheme whereby the total number and type of documents selected results in realizing the full value of a required postage category and/or in selecting specific documents based on demographic or other characteristics of the addressee.